SkySavage

A digital skydiving logbook, designed to support progression in the sport.

SkySavage serves two audiences: new licensed skydivers learning to improve their landings, and advanced athletes who want to log jumps faster without giving up the depth of data they rely on. It covers the logbook, landing-pattern review, and cross-jump stats on iOS and macOS — designed and developed end-to-end.

Clarity in a high-attention environment.

Skydiving is task-specific and time-critical. The interface had to present information that was easy to scan, actionable, and easy to review over time — not just in the moment of logging a jump, but weeks later when someone reviews their patterns and refines technique. Clarity wasn't a nice-to-have. It was the brief.

27 skydivers, one repeating pain point.

Before writing a line of SwiftUI, I ran moderated interviews with 27 skydivers across the experience curve — from a B-license student with 80 jumps to a Safety & Training Advisor with 1,700+ — including current paper-logbook holdouts, club organizers, canopy course participants, and instructors who debrief students daily.

Three findings repeated across nearly every conversation. Paper logbooks get lost, forgotten, or left at home — and skydivers know it, but the digital alternatives feel too rigid, get discontinued, or require pulling out a phone mid-jump, which no one will do. Landing-pattern disputes are a recurring safety problem — without objective data, the post-landing argument at the drop zone goes unresolved. And review for progression is broken today — even experienced jumpers can't easily compare canopies, track high-performance turn altitudes, or see their patterns over time.

Tab bar to sidebar: focus over familiarity.

During early prototyping I tested two navigation directions side by side and walked potential users through both. The first was a native iOS bottom tab bar — the safe, familiar choice. The second collapsed navigation into a left sidebar and kept the logbook on the primary surface at all times.

The feedback was consistent across the sample: skydivers wanted the logbook to be the app, not one tab among four. The sidebar variant won on three counts — fewer taps between opening the app and starting a jump, less chrome competing with the data, and a mental model that scales cleanly from iOS to macOS, where a sidebar is the native pattern anyway. The final UI carries the same vocabulary across surfaces; the macOS sidebar IS the iOS sidebar, just sized for the device.

Three things the product does.

Landing Pattern Tracking.

The killer feature, surfaced by every user interview, gets a dedicated surface of its own. Each jump's canopy flight is recorded as a GPS track and rendered on the dropzone map — the spiral down, the speed at every waypoint, the altitude above ground, the moment of touchdown.

The same view doubles as evidence in landing-pattern disputes and as a teaching tool for canopy courses. "Show me what you did" stops being a memory exercise.

A reusable SwiftUI package, inside the app.

Because I designed and developed the product myself, the in-app design system lives inside the codebase as a reusable SwiftUI package. That forced me to think beyond individual screens — focusing on native behavior, component consistency, implementation quality, and how the experience scales across surfaces. Buttons, typography, color tokens, icons, and form controls all ship from a single SwiftUI source.

Shared system, native surfaces.

The same product runs on iOS and macOS — but it's not one product squeezed into two windows. Components and logic are shared via the design-system package; layouts, interactions, and chrome defer to what each platform expects. I had to think beyond a single phone UI and consider how the experience should translate across devices while still feeling native to each surface.

Tested in the same room as the research.

As the prototype came together, I showed it during the same interview sessions — testing whether the design decisions held up once users actually saw them. The reception was strongest around the landing-pattern map, which several interviewees said matched what they'd been doing manually for years: screenshotting altimeter data, marking up paper logbooks, and trying to reconstruct the canopy flight from memory.

USPA approval came mid-development. Multiple interviewees opted in to test the live app before public launch, and their feedback — mostly small UI corrections, a few feature requests around video and drop-zone integrations — informed the 1.0 release.

What shipped, what improved.

Tools and methods.